Chilligavva

After a long long time, I ended up developing a blogger template for my friend Surya Prakash. 
He has an excellent blog going, with some profound posts. So I decided to give his blog a much needed rehaul.  After all, what are friends for?

PS: It is interesting that “Surya Prakash” means “Sun Light”, and his blog has a light reference.  Me thinks it is deliberate.

Inspiration:
The blog title “Random Flickers of Light”.  Obviously ‘Light flicker’ spoke out to me, design wise.

Approach:
I tried out some light flares on a dark background using GIMP. Surya’s earlier template was light text on dark blue [Minima by Douglas Bowman].  I then toyed with dark header band followed by a light bottom, quite like a split Hemingway.
That didnt look good either. So I deliberately went for a dark on light approach. I decided to give Surya the blue he likes so much, but in a lighter warmer teal. I then went opposite and added a warm brown.  I now had the 2 extreme points of the pallette.

Layout:
Surya didnt have too much action going in his blog. So in accordance with his clean approach, I decided to go for a two coloumn layout, and keep the focus on the content instead of the sidebar.

Features:
Surya didnt have a feedburner account or a feed link in his earlier blog. So I went google hopping for a “3d RSS Icon” and stumbled upon a white background coffeecup feed icon. I matched the background to the blog background using GIMP, and set up a feedburner account as well.

Design elements:
There is only one design element that is repeated in varying sizes, and that is the light flare in the header and a smaller one in the post meta found at the bottom of the page.

I had fun styling the blog motto in varying shades of brown,cinnamon and teal. [Top right, aka top of the sidebar]

Faulty Estimates/Learning from the experience:
Most templates for blogger are XML based and widget ready [Something a very T-Rex me failed to anticipate.]
So when I sent the HTML file to Surya, he had trouble handling the “bad XML” warning he got. So after granting me access, I quickly fixed this one by reverting to a classic style and sticking the html template for now.

Note to self: Learn XML well, and figure out the secret blogger variables and what they stand for..

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